


It Starts Here

by SmudgedPrints



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-05
Updated: 2014-05-05
Packaged: 2018-01-22 01:53:20
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1571666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SmudgedPrints/pseuds/SmudgedPrints
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don't talk, and who knows how they got here.</p>
            </blockquote>





	It Starts Here

Maybe it started when Tucker ripped his helmet off and demanded that Wash "look him in the fucking eyes for a change".

Maybe it started when Washington, as angry and frustrated as Tucker was, tossed his own helmet aside, and got right into Tucker's face as they kept on yelling.

Maybe it started when Tucker grabbed the front of Wash's armour and slammed him into the flimsy, too-thin wall of the bunk room he'd been assigned in the rebel base.

Maybe it started when Wash reversed their positions.

Maybe it started when one of them brought the other close enough so that lips, tongue and teeth could angrily, heavily clash.

However it started, it ended some time later, with Wash pulling his armour back on, resettling layers of underarmour mesh, power nets and plating, pointedly not looking back at Tucker where he lay barely covered by the thing crappy blanket that was all they were assigned.

Wash looked at his helmet, turned it over in his hands. It was the last piece of armour he had yet to don. "This didn't happen," he said, tautly.

Tucker's assigned bunk was against an exterior wall. He only had one neighbour, Caboose, who was probably dead to the world asleep. "Whatever," he said, and rolled over, pretending he wasn't lying in a wet spot. 

Wash hesitated, like he might have said something else, but then he set his helmet back onto his head, seating it with a habitual thump, and left without a second glance. Tucker waited until he heard the thud of footsteps disappearing into the distance before he got up and stripped the bed. 

**

Wash and Sarge had gotten into the habit of speaking in low-voiced conversations that stopped as soon as anyone approached them. It was a subtle, easy to miss thing, if no one had known them or been familiar with them. Their recovery from captivity a remarkable thing. But Donut hung around Sarge more often than not silently, and Wash just said even less than usual.

Kimball had kept her word. They'd managed to rescue their friends, and she had offered them their best ship to get off the planet. Unfortunately, their 'best ship' was a clapped out old junker of a freighter that had seen better days around fifty years earlier, and wasn't exactly spaceworthy. 

"She said it was the best, not that it was any good," Felix pointed out, when Tucker had finished cursing Kimball out for hedging the truth. 

In displaced retribution, Tucker had put the grunts through an extra fifty laps around the camp. Sarge was working on the ship, along with a few of the engineers that Kimball could spare, but the Civil War didn't wait for any of them, and they had to make raids on supply centres for simple things like rations, or cause a distraction in some godforsaken desert valley full of smoking craters to draw the Feds away from the main base.

Wash usually came along with Tucker on those raids, though he had politely refused to take on a unit of his own. They didn't talk much, though they walked side by side, and sat in silence together in the mess hall, refueling on caffeine and junk calories after a hard day running around in a warzone.

Wash was drinking coffee through a straw that he had slipped into the intake valve on his helmet. Some might have thought it was because he wanted to cultivate from sense of hardass mystique. Tucker knew better, knew that Wash was self conscious about the fact that without a faceplate masking him, it revealed him to look like some kid too fresh faced and naive to be allowed anywhere near a gun. He didn't look like someone used to being betrayed twice before breakfast, until, of course, you looked into his eyes, or saw the neat medical scar at the base of his skull, the one that Wash smacked Tucker's hands away from whenever they came close.

"You know," Wash said, conversationally, "Even if they get the bucket of rust they call a ship up in the sky, there's AA guns all over the place. We wouldn't even manage to break atmosphere."

"Of course not. That would be too fucking easy." Nothing about this planet was easy. Tucker was sick of the place.

Wash slurped at his coffee, almost contemplatively. "I could run an assault on the local banks," he said, "Give you guys enough time to escape."

"Enough with your fucking death wish, Wash," Tucker said, angrier than Wash's mild tone deserved, and slammed out of the mess hall, overturning his chair in the process.

Wash appeared in his room that night, well past midnight at a point where Tucker might have been asleep in the days before training schedules and actual mission planning and shit. 

"I don't have a death wish," he said, tightly, though he sounded a lot like he was trying to convince himself rather than Tucker.

Tucker stared at him a long moment. He saw Wash's fingers twitching, making abortive movements towards the catches and latches that would allow his armour to disengage, and fall away. He had no idea what people meant when they said Wash was hard to read.

"Are we just going to sit around and talk about our feelings like a couple of bitches, or are you here to get something done?" he asked, eyebrows raised in challenge.

Wash hesitated, but it was at least only for a moment. He was gone before the dawn broached the horizon.

**

When the east wall of the armoury exploded, there was nothing but absolute chaos for about fifteen minutes until the captains managed to corral their units into some sort of order, and then let them sort out the rest of the grunts. Their first instinct was to assume that they were under attack, but when no gunfire followed, and no invading forces appeared on the horizon, it became obvious that what had happened was a fortunate one off accident.

That one off accident left three dead and eight in the infirmary, amongst them, Wash, who had taken a piece of shrapnel into the power plant of his armour and suffered a flash burn across half his back as a result. He was one of the better off, as it turned out. Private Marconette, who had been standing next to him, lost her arm.

They later found out that a faulty grenade had exploded, one of a batch brought in from a recent raid on a supply depot. They couldn't be certain that it had been deliberately rigged, so Kimball ordered all seized arms to be more thoroughly inspected in the future. They'd been fortunate that the box had been sitting just outside the armoury, waiting to be stored, rather than inside, amongst some of their heavier weapons.

Fortunate.

Lucky.

Tucker didn't exactly agree with those terms, but he said nothing, and sat with Caboose at Wash's bedside, looking tiny and too-young under bandages and burn ointment. The doctor had assured them he'd be out within a couple of days, but Tucker felt like suggesting that they keep him in, just so Wash could sleep. The man had black circles under his eyes, and Tucker tried to work out when he had last seen Wash take a break.

It would have been the other night, with-

Tucker slammed the breaks on that train of thought quickly.

Wash, as it turned out, had less of a tolerance for the medical unit than they did for him, and he discharged himself early the following morning, retreating to the privacy of his own bunk. 

Tucker didn't follow him.

**

He found Caboose in the mess hall, watched over by his lieutenant, who just nodded vaguely towards Tucker when he entered the empty room. It was out of normal eating hours, and normally Tucker would have been vaguely terrified at Caboose's presence near objects that could create fire, but he hoped that the silent overseer who was pretending to drink coffee was there to prevent the entire base from burning down.

"What are you doing?" Tucker asked, after watching Caboose rattle through the cupboards and do something frankly terrifying with an egg whisk. 

"Making cookies," Caboose said, cheerfully. "Chocolate chip. Agent Washington's favourite."

Tucker blinked. "He tell you that?"

Caboose was still wearing his helmet, so Tucker had to imagine the wide-eyed blinking that was no doubt being aimed in his direction. "Chocolate chip is everyone's favourite."

"Can't argue with that," Tucker admitted. 

He watched Caboose work for a long, silent, moment, before finally admitting to himself that it didn't look like the kitchen was in imminent danger of exploding, so he could probably relax. 

"Yeah, people always want their favourite things when they're not feeling so good. Their favourite foods. Their favourite people."

"You're kinda freaky when you make sense," Tucker said, "Like the world isn't spinning right."

"I get that sometimes," Caboose agreed sagely, "If you try spinning the other way on the spot, it helps."

"Right," Tucker said, and fled before Caboose could accidentally turn the oven into an unregulated nuclear reactor.

**

Wash was already naked under the thin, shitty Republic-issue blanket. He was obviously uncomfortable, lying on his side making no attempt to do anything other than stare into the middle distance and obviously try to tough out the pain of the injury to his back.

"Caboose is baking you cookies," Tucker told him, after he had walked into Wash's bunk and then stared at his body, seeming so small out of the armour that felt like his was more his identity than the face he wore.

"That's nice," Wash said, awkwardly, a look of faint puzzlement crossing his face.

"Chocolate chip."

"My favourite."

He walked forward, removed his gauntlet, and rested his hand, fingers splayed, against Wash's chest, feeling out his heartbeat. A little fast, but still there.

"You're not dead," he said, striving to sound light-hearted, but for some reason the words caught in his throat.

"Not yet."

"Fuck you."

Wash stretched pointedly and raised an eyebrow.

Later, when he was bracing Wash as the man sagged back against him, massaging still softening flesh with one hand and smoothing the other across his belly, holding him upright with his body so that the still tender flesh of the burn didn't rub to hard against the underarmour Tucker hadn't managed to get out of, he heard a faint sigh.

He could hear it so easily because Wash's head was flopped back against his shoulder, and his mouth was occupied in the region of his throat. They were not cuddling. This was manly basking.

"I'm not-" Wash started, then halted. He turned his head away, looking at the wall. He tried again, "I don't-"

"Yeah, me neither," Tucker said, honestly having no idea what they were talking about.

He waited in silence until Wash turned back to look at him, and then captured his mouth in the filthiest, wettest kiss he could imagine, putting all his effort into keeping Wash quiet, and his own thoughts unvoiced.

It worked, because moments later, Wash had shifted, and was unfastening Tucker's underarmour with strong, calloused fingers. Tucker wondered, vaguely, how they'd even managed to get here in the first place.

**

Maybe it started when Tucker was walking past Kimball's quarters, and Felix emerged, noticeably adjusting his armour.

Maybe it started when Tucker said, carelessly, "You and Kimball, eh?" in a lecherous tone.

Maybe it started when Felix retorted, "You and Washington, eh?"

Maybe it started when he simply said, "Yes?"

Maybe it started when Felix sniffed at his inability to get a rise out of Tucker, and walked away.

But maybe it all really started back before any of them had ever heard of Chorus, or the New Republic or the Federation, or met the grunts who were willing to lay down their lives for stupid ideals and beliefs. 

Or maybe it started when Tucker turned around, heading not to the mess hall as intended, but t Wash's quarters, where the man himself was occupied in reading something with a lot of columns on a datapad. He glanced up curiously when Tucker entered and didn't immediately say anything. 

"Problem?" he prompted.

"Not in the slightest," Tucker said, and meant it.

\- End -


End file.
